Vanderbilt Tom. Survival city: adventures among the ruins of atomic America

The University of Chicago Press, 2002. — 235 p. — ISBN: 978-0-226-84694-1I want to get to where the Cold War is still ending in America, so I set out after sunrise one early July morning from Grand Forks, North Dakota, bearing west on u.s. 2. After some 45 miles, I turn left on n.d. 1, then drive another 45 miles down a road of typical Dakotan sparseness, so empty that passing drivers wave with old-fashioned courtesy at the sheer novelty of human company, or on the fair assumption they probably know you anyway.
I eventually reach Cooperstown, North Dakota, billed on a sign as “Tree City u.s.a.,” a neatly arranged farming town that scrupulously adheres to its slogan. I catch a glimpse of lawn that turns out to be the town’s municipal park, barely visible beneath a thick canopy of oaks and elms.
Turning left on Main Street, I park in front of an unmarked, nearly empty storefront, nestled between a theater showing Mission Impossible 2 and a quaint apothecary. On the storefront window is a single ten-by-twelve color photograph depicting what appears to be a tornado, brown and angry and heaving with dirt and debris, boring into one of the state’s endless green horizons. What it actually shows, if one steps inside and takes a closer look, is the implosion of one of the state’s 150 Minuteman missile silos, the invisible fortresses of the atomic age. For decades, they stood silent sentinel beneath the whistling prairies, scattered across some 7,500 square miles—from Valley City, North Dakota clear through to the Canadian border. Only their three-phase power poles and some small brown signs (attached to nearby “Stop” signs or sometimes standing independently) bearing designations like “c-28” and “d-15” gave evidence they were there.